The Sand Fish

by Maha Gargash

  She did not hear his return. She did not see him standing over her. She only felt his crushing grasp.

  Noora opened her mouth, but no scream escaped. Shock and fear trapped her voice as she felt his powerful knuckles dig into the cage of her ribs. Scooped up in his arms, she pierced the air with futile kicks. Desperately, she tried to think. Instead, she gasped like a fish pulled out of water.

  Then she felt a thud. Ibrahim had let her go, just as the third bolt of lightning ripped open the sky.

  And the rain she’d been waiting for all those months finally fell.

  6

  She’d leaped to her feet like a hunted animal and scampered up the mountain. In the swell of the storm, Noora searched for a hole she could crawl into. She wanted to be alone to nurse her wounds—a hideous blend of pain and shame.

  Under the dark, thundering sky, she roamed blind as a mole, slipping over rivers of running earth and stumbling over dodgy stones reeled in her path by the force of the wind. Where was she? For the first time, Noora felt lost in her mountains.

  Someone was calling her. Or was it the wind hooting her name?

  “Noooooraaaa!”

  The moon emerged as an island in the black sky—just for an instant, just enough to throw a cold, blue beam on a figure. She caught the flaps of a dishdasha and turned to run away.

  “Wait. Come back. Where are you going?”

  She recognized Sager’s voice and realized that she had been circling blindly, close to home. He was waving his arm at her. She hurried up toward him and began helping him pull out all the containers, every pot and jug they could find. As they lined them up to collect the rainwater, the sky let loose a bolt of lightning that exposed the ache that throbbed in her face.

  It took only a nudge of a question for Noora to let her agony pour out, fierce as the rain that pelted the mountains. By the time they staggered into her hut to dry themselves, all the shock and turmoil that had bubbled in her settled like frozen droplets at her finger tips. As for Sager, there was a fury in him. She could tell by the way he was rubbing dry his head.

  “It is no use talking to him anymore,” he said. “He hasn’t just retreated quietly into his head; he has become dangerous. You know, I’d noticed things in him, angry things, and pretended I hadn’t. There were these…these…wicked looks in his eyes.”

  Noora wanted to say something wise, and when she couldn’t think of anything, she kept squeezing the wet out of her plaits. In the light of the hurricane lamp, their stretched shadows danced along the walls.

  “I never imagined he would attack you like that,” Sager said, continuing to flatten his curls with vigorous rubs. “And you know what else? It’s just going to get worse. We have to do something…” Suddenly he froze, and his dancing shadow turned into a blob on the wall.

  “What, what is it?” said Noora.

  “I have an idea. I think I know someone who might be able to help him.”

  “Who?”

  “Zobaida Bint-Sheer.”

  “Zobaida? She can’t help him.”

  He nodded and his wilted curls awoke. “Yes, yes, she can.”

  “How can she help him? What is she going to do? Ask for advice from the jinn?”

  Sager stopped nodding at the mention of the mysterious jinn, those invisible spirits, made of fire, which lived in their own world but sometimes managed to slip into the human world.

  Noora sneered at him. “You really believe she can talk to them?”

  “Maybe…I mean, every Muslim knows they exist,” Sager said, and coughed to shake the quiver out of his voice. “It’s established in the Holy Koran.”

  “Well, I don’t see how she can help abbah,” Noora said. “I mean, she’s just interested in cheating people out of their money.”

  “No, she’s not. She is a healer. People come from everywhere to see her. They travel from the far deserts, the sea towns. They come for everything: broken bones, aging pains, stomach cramps…”

  Noora began shaking her head, resisting his idea, even though it was beginning to make more and more sense. Why was it that whenever he suggested anything, she always felt like disagreeing? Why couldn’t she just agree?

  “…exorcisms, the evil eye, mystery illnesses—just like the one that is making our father mad. Zobaida is famous for her healing powers.”

  Noora continued to shake her head. “Anyway, abbah won’t even meet her. He says she is just a witch who deals with the devil.”

  “Maybe she has ways to make him listen to her,” said Sager. “Or maybe she’ll mix a potion or two to cure him.” He flung his arms in the air. “I don’t know. All I know is that everyone says she is a miracle maker. And that’s exactly what we need: a miracle.”

  Finally, Noora began nodding—slowly—while she thought about it. “But he’ll never agree.”

  “He doesn’t have to know yet.”

  “He hates her.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Sager raked his hand through his hair. “Look,” he said, “let’s just go and see her, find out what she says.”

  Noora let out her acceptance in an exhausted sigh.

  By the time Sager returned to his hut, the hammering drops had softened to a light drizzle. Noora lolled on her mattress, listening to the fill and spill of the containers outside, as runaway raindrops slid off the roof and plopped into them.

  She stretched her arms over her head and tightened her feet to a point. She rolled her neck from side to side to let the strain of the grueling day dissolve. She had to get some rest. She and Sager had agreed to visit Zobaida at first light.

  With the late night hours, the sky cleared and a full moon bathed the interior of Noora’s hut with its sapphire glow. The night crickets rasped their lullaby in an intoxicating air, so cool, just right for a peaceful sleep. But Noora remained awake, struggling between an icy rage and burning tears.

  All night she had been trying not to hate her father, trying to pity him instead. But she could not. Anger and frustration continued to grip her, tight as a murderous fist, as dagger-sharp images of how he had flung her and crushed her exploded in her mind.

  And then the purple predawn darkness swallowed the night. Noora heard the crunch of the donkey’s hooves on the rocks. She sat up, eyes alert. It’s time, she thought.

  7

  Aow-wah! Aow-wah!”

  The familiar howls echoed in the valley. To Noora, it was a welcome respite after her long walk with Sager, a silent walk in a light mist, in which she had remained wrapped in her thoughts. Not that Sager was feeling chatty. He had put on his stern-man face.

  “I think we’ve been spotted,” Noora said. She squinted, but all she could see was Maazoolah, perched on a slender neck of the mountains from which terraced plots stepped down.

  “Aooo!”

  “Just like baby wolves.”

  Sager’s tight mouth finally loosened into a smile. “The little ones must be practicing,” he said.

  The little boys of Maazoolah dashed out from behind the rocky outcrops lower down from the village, descending in tumbles and hops toward them in a jumble of sizes. They squeaked their greetings like kids bleating for attention.

  “Marhaba Sager. Marhaba Noora.”

  “Let’s play, let’s play.”

  “Can we ride the donkey?”

  “You scared us silly with those howls,” said Sager, and cleared the yirz, water skin, and tin bowl off the donkey’s back.

  “Yes,” added Noora. “We were about to turn around and flee. We thought some nasty tribe had taken over your village.”

  “Don’t think we saw you just now,” said a plucky little lad. “We spotted you a long time ago and followed you before letting out the alert.”

  “We thought we were going to be attacked,” said Sager. “Thank God, you don’t have any weapons with you.”

  “We’ve got our weapons, but we take them out only if we need to,” said the brave one, pulling out a coarse branch from behind his back. “We wouldn’t char
ge unless we were prepared.” He turned his head toward his army of ragamuffins and, raising his hand, signaled the confirmation. They pulled out their arms—twigs, stems, leaves—from under their tattered dishdashas.

  As the procession headed up to the village, Maazoolah’s little girls joined them. They held Noora’s hand and followed Sager, who was trying to control the boys. “My poor donkey is going to collapse,” said Sager, as each lad used his strength to bully the other off the beast’s back. The donkey brayed its complaints.

  Sager tried again. “That’s three of you on its back. Get off, Salem, you are too big. Besides, you have stayed on too long. Let little Omar have a turn now.” Other boys were clambering onto his shoulders, choking him with stubborn grips, knocking his ghitra off. Sager bent over to pick it up and chuckled with pleasure. “You’re smothering me.”

  By the time they reached the high settlement, Sager and Noora were walking in a sea of bouncing youngsters, howling and squealing with excitement. It wasn’t every day that visitors came to their village.

  Some twenty stone homes made up Maazoolah, forming a crude circle on the flat plain at the top of the mountain. The women were scurrying in and out of their homes, busy with their household tasks, and working the plots, along with the rest of the men, were Sager’s friends. They had watched his noisy arrival and were now heading toward him with smiles.

  “Salam Alaikum, peace be on you!” they called.

  “Alaikum As-Salam, and on you be peace.” Sager returned their greeting, followed by a heaving of syllables, which released each of their names with the customary tone of masculinity adopted by the young men of the mountains: “Saif! Abdullah! Mohammad! Marhaba!”

  At once, Noora felt shy. After rounding up the girls to one side, she lifted the edge of her shayla and, holding it just under her eyes, watched her brother extend his nose to touch his friends’ noses, one by one, in the traditional welcome—three light sweeps of the tip: left to right, right to left, and a middle press. This nose kiss was the unwritten etiquette of greeting for the men of the region.

  News of their arrival had reached the village long before they had heard the children’s howls. Although there were no watchtowers at Maazoolah, the community’s roving eyes were sharp. And so, old woman Moza Bint-Falah, a distant cousin of their mother’s, had readied breakfast for them: Arabic coffee, dates, and bread, sprinkled liberally with energy-giving mountain ghee laid out on the round, palm frond dining mat just outside the hut for the boys. Noora would join Moza indoors.

  She was waiting for them at the door of her two-room hut. Her silver plaits rested on her chest, on a loose orange thoub with yellow dots, so sheer and light it was like a haze covering the red dress that was underneath it. Sager kissed the old woman’s head and hand, then Noora did the same.

  “Masha’ Allah, how you’ve changed, how you have grown,” said Moza. She held the wide sleeves of the thoub tight under her shayla and squinted at them through the generous slits of her burka. “I haven’t seen you in such a long time.”

  Sager’s and Noora’s eyes met in a knowing glance. “No, khalti Moza, you saw us recently,” said Sager.

  Moza swept her head toward them and nudged out her ear. Remembering her dampened sense of hearing, Sager spoke louder, “We came when our mother died.”

  Noora, her father, and brothers had carried Fatma’s body all the way to Maazoolah on a stretcher so that a large group of people could recite the prayers of the dead before burying her. It was the proper way. It was the Islamic way.

  “Your mother?”

  Talk had it that Moza’s memory lapses had begun three years before when her husband, as sometimes happened with other mountain men, wandered off into the mountains and never came back. The villagers had searched for Sultan Bin-Zahran for weeks before giving up. But Moza had refused to lose her faith in his return. After all, Sultan, with his pointy beard and darting eyes, was Maazoolah’s enterprising drifter. With his bandolier of ammunition crossing his chest and circling his waist, he scaled the mountains and the desert beyond, collecting wood, honey, and even mountain radishes and herbs. Then he would sell or barter what he could. Everything he brought back, Moza locked away in a tin chest that she kept in her bedroom.

  “Have you forgotten, khalti?” said Noora.

  “We buried her in the graveyard over there,” Sager said, waving his arm over his shoulder.

  “And then I stayed with you,” Noora added, waiting for a hint of recollection in Moza’s lazy eyes.

  Throughout the three days of mourning, the scent of damp breathing and heavy sighs had filled Moza’s hut as Maazoolah’s women arrived to pay their respects to Noora. There were waves of moans and groans of regret (or perhaps body aches, since it was always the old women who initiated this road of sorrow). And then, they let out their pleas:

  “The sorrow! Let it out so you don’t feel it later.”

  “Cry, child, cry now!”

  Then silence.

  They had wanted her to release her heartache quickly so that she could get on with the act of living. Conditioned from very early, they knew it was senseless to let a loss disturb the emotional balance of life for too long. There was enough severity in their world. The unforgiving sun, the callous rays, the incessant dust, the lack of water—all of it stretched the line that separated life from death, stretched it so thin it could snap with a blink of the eyes. That was the way to look at things—the only way—in the Hararees. The old women moaned once more, before urging Noora to remember that death was small, that dwelling on it was pointless: “The world is for the living.”

  “Don’t let the sadness rot in your head. Just move on.”

  Moving on! Wasn’t that what their life—all of them—was about?

  Finally, when all else had failed, they had surrendered to their accepted wisdom.

  “Nothing we can do about it; Allah is the decider.”

  “What are we, except His subjects and slaves?”

  What a grief-stricken lot they were, slumped all around her with those long faces. They had tried so hard, but how could she snivel and whimper in front of those strangers?

  Noora signaled Sager to join his friends and, ushering Moza into the hut, tried again. “Don’t you remember how full of women your house was?”

  Finally, Moza’s sluggish eyelids turned taught. “Ah, ah, ah, I do. Now I do.” She tugged at her silver plaits with the recollection. “You stayed with me, yes. But you didn’t stay long, did you?”

  “Ten days,” Noora said.

  “Ten days?” Moza’s eyes went blank.

  This time Noora did not explain—and the old woman seemed to forget just as quickly. As they settled around the breakfast mat, Moza asked, “What news?”

  “No news, except the news of rain,” said Noora. “Lots of rain, masha’ Allah, yesterday—all in one go.”

  “Ah, the rain always comes,” said Moza, staring at the air. “When it leaves, you think it’s gone forever…but then it comes.”

  The beauty that came with the occasional rain was all any of them knew of the gentleness of nature. And now, the boys were talking about it, too. Noora had to lean back to see them through the open entrance of the hut. They were eating, bent over the palm-frond mat. Mohammad said, “We’ve had a whole week of it. It just stopped yesterday.”

  Noora took a large bite of bread and, as she chewed, fought a sudden pang of jealousy that rose in her. How unfair! Maazoolah had a full week of rain and her family had received only one day. Even the clouds blow sweeter away from our home, she thought, and pushed the rest of the bread into her mouth.

  “Yes,” added Saif, pouring some coffee for Sager. “It came late, but it came a lot. Masha’ Allah, look at how green our plots have become.”

  Sager swallowed the bitter brew in one gulp. Then, jiggling the tiny bowl-shaped cup lightly between his thumb and forefinger (an indication that he didn’t want a refill), he glanced over his shoulder.

  Noora stretched her nec
k and followed his glance, catching a view of the tapering terraces. From the edges of the mountain rim, they narrowed downward, each surrounded by low, stone walls. With a base of barren rock, the Hararees yielded less grazing than the sandy deserts of the interior. The mountains held just enough soil to make the scanty cultivation possible. But Saif was right; Maazoolah’s cramped parcels of land were a shocking green.

  “That was a wonderful downpour,” said Abdullah.

  “A blessing,” added Mohammad.

  “A true blessing,” echoed Saif. “We even slaughtered two goats to celebrate. And then we performed the nadba.”

  The nadba: nobody quite knew who had made it up, but whenever it took place, every man and boy rushed to join in.

  “You should have seen us,” said Mohammad. “What a manly chorus we were around old man Abdul-Rahman. He held that goat’s skull high up and barked away.”

  “Masha’ Allah, he still has the best voice of all,” said Saif.

  “Yes, I could feel the blood rush up and tickle my face every time he shouted hao,” said Abdullah.

  The other boys let out a series of coordinated yaps—“Hao, hao, hao”—before collapsing into a frenzy of laughter that shaped a sad smile in Noora’s head. It was a long time ago, but those eerie cries of togetherness remained vivid in her memory. She leaned forward and chomped more of the gooey bread. It was the second piece, and still her empty stomach would not fill.

  Noora was just a little girl, young enough to be in the company of men, when her father had held her high on his shoulder to watch the nadba. The circle of men was tight around the cheerleader, a man whose voice was particularly strong. Clutching the blanched skull of the goat they had just eaten, he raised his arm above his head and barked his appreciation. As he repeated the curious howls, he was echoed by the group.

  The tribe had bonded further with an upsurge of raised fists that pulled Noora into the performance, too. Her voice had risen high, shrill as a yowling kitten, over the men’s deep grunts. It went on and on till she thought it would never end. But then the coughs of exhaustion brought it to an abrupt halt. Their voices had turned hoarse.